 Our MSc research and international development is an interdisciplinary degree that is about understanding research methods, the main debates in international development, and the complex ways in which researchers' different positions in these debates both affect and are affected by the various methodological choices that they make. Training in research methods, as applied to international development, is central to the three core courses of this program. The first one introduces students to the fundamentals of research methods. The second one introduces students to key statistical methods for social sciences. The third course is called Battlefields of Methods. The course questions the neutrality and objectivity of methodological choices and investigates how each methodological approach inevitably helps to both unravel and obscure aspects and dimensions of reality. The course first explores the relationship between method as a paradigm, as a type of research and as a technique and politics, as the standpoint of the researcher, as a policy perspective and as a contested social transformation. It then seeks to understand further the relationship between research methods, power and the production of knowledge in international development to a number of case studies. These are battlefields of methods because different approaches to researching and addressing a development problem clash with students who work on understanding why and how they clash. One case study is about gender inequalities in education and girls' education in particular. We examine how specific forms of evidence inform different understandings of girls' education as a development issue, exploring the ideological and methodological dimensions of how findings are constructed and conveyed. Through student-led group work, we compare the evidence of quantitative data, qualitative research and policy reports. We analyse what indices of gender and education tell us, what they do not tell us, and the types of policy responses that have emerged out of the evidence of gender inequalities. We look at the challenges of carrying out research on violence and violent conflict. We ask what are the key challenges for people trying to carry out research, either on violence or in situations or contexts that have been affected by large-scale violent conflict. We look at the ways in which some of those methodologies for studying violence and conflict directly conflict with one another, but we also ask, to what extent and in what ways it might be possible to combine some of those different methodologies to deepen our insights. The MSc Research Methods for International Development has provided me with a really strong foundation from which to build on my own research. Our students embark on a wide range of career opportunities, which include either doctoral studies at SOAS or elsewhere, or jobs as policy advisors and researchers in international development in the public-private-authorised sector.